A New York Times columnist has made a bit of a splash in the elites’ fetid swimming pool by proclaiming that his media brethren will not make the same mistakes with President Trump that they made in 2016. This open declaration of political bias is, of course, yet another major mistake, but these people are so far gone in their delusions that there is no point even trying to explain that simple fact to them.

…press is angry because their coverage of a major presidential candidate turned out to help him rather than harm him.

Frank Bruni wrote a defiant piece in which he vowed that the media won’t “let him set the terms of the 2020 presidential campaign.” We all know who “him” is. This sounds like the remark of a petulant child unhappy that he doesn’t get to run a playground game. But there is even more to be revealed by Bruni’s sour grapes than just a determination to spite a president. He is indeed displaying the foremost media trait that turns off so many Americans: The assumption that they get to set the agenda – that they get to decide what is and isn’t news. Instead of merely reporting as per their alleged job responsibilities, this elitist demands to be a player himself, and, it would seem, the starting quarterback.

Fooling Themselves

Bruni is so warped by his own vitriol that he finds it offensive that major press outlets were forced to cover an Oval Office address to the nation given by a sitting president. “We had to weigh a request in line with precedent against a president out of line when it comes to truth,” he obtusely writes. “We had to wrestle with — and figure out when and how to resist — his talent for using us as vessels for propaganda.”

Frank Bruni

No, Mr. Bruni. You didn’t have to do any of these things. You could have chosen merely to accurately report what the president said and what his political opponents said in reply, and then let your readers decide for themselves what to make of it all. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

There is no doubt that a hate-filled big box media played right into Trump’s hands in 2016 and this is what galls them the most. A supposedly neutral, non-partisan press is angry because their coverage of a major presidential candidate turned out to help him rather than harm him.

But just as importantly, by portraying Trump as a media creation, the establishment that controls our major news organs can reinforce their own power, if only in their own minds, and wave away the populist nationalist uprising that propelled him into office. This is worse than just a misjudgment of what is actually going on in the grassroots America that these elites know absolutely nothing about. This is willful denial, the very symptom that destroyed establishment candidates on both side of the uniparty coin in 2016.

From Jeb Bush to Hillary Clinton and everywhere in between, our cartel politicians and their media allies first could not understand and then would not accept that a sea change was happening in their cozy little world. Bruni’s transparent signal that they are still choosing not to get in touch with the new reality four years later shows that these hopeless partisans with press credentials will be completely ineffective once again in their all-out assault on the president in 2020.

Do It All Again

Of course Bruni is not the only major media figure to get drunk on his own personal biases. Take the Columbia Journalism Review, which laughably anoints itself “the intellectual leader in the rapidly changing world of journalism.” This would-be paragon of proper journalism featured an article on its website offering “8 tips for covering the 2020 presidential race.”

Really now, is this good “intellectual” advice for journalists who have been totally discredited by flagrant partisanship to follow in covering the next presidential election?

“Deal with, and report on, the Donald Trump as he has shown himself over the last two years: the racist, the xenophobe, the sexist, the liar. … The race for the presidency isn’t a game of fantasy politics, where we can pretend people are who [sic] want them to be or need then [sic] to be. Trump is a man with a track record and a public record that should be addressed as they are.”

A media obsessed with over-the-top nonstop negative coverage of Donald Trump saw its shameful antics spectacularly backfire on them in 2016. Media figures are now vowing to learn from their mistakes in 2020. Their solution is to be even more outlandishly negative. There is a man sitting in a house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue grinning from ear to ear over all of this. Too bad for the media elites that, blinded by hatred, they simply can’t grasp how he got there.

6 Comments

TheBadOne

Let us inform this idiot of the propaganda machine. You control nothing, while you may have brainwashed some of the general public, the rest of us are quite a bit smarter. You sir, do not call the shots, you are in charge of nothing more than your own idioti thoughts. Real Americans no longer have faith in media, because we see the real truth, not the truth you present. You sir are a traitor to your profession and your county. You must be daft, with your comments. The Real Americans laugh at you and the rest of your kind. So you can sit down and shut up.

Frank Bruni’s opinions are obnoxious. The hatred of everything Trump among Frank and his media cohorts has been exposed for what it is … the journalist community has flirted with partisanship for decades and their denials of it are actually as sophomoric in their believability as are Hillary’s denial of the real reasons for her use of the Clinton email server.

Their almost total Trump hatred has served them well financially ….. a weird dichotomy.

James Fite

“the intellectual leader in the rapidly changing world of journalism.”

laughable indeed.

Never mind the blatant bias and sensationalism, which you already point out.

What about how poorly written that quote is? Not only does it run afoul of repetitive word use — an arguably stylistic issue — they’ve misspelled one word and omitted another entirely! Who wants people to be something? I, you, he, she, we, they, the Martians? No, it’s the Russians of course. It’s always the Russians with these anti Trumpers. Then, them, and than often get mixed up; they’re just too similar for such errors not to occur occasionally when someone is typing quickly — but that’s why publications have editors. Sure, we’re all human and we all make mistakes, even editors. Even good editors, for that matter. And for that reason, I have no issue extending the professional courtesy of cutting them some slack when I see these errors — even emailing them sometimes to point them out — but these specific examples have survived more than a week of being live on the web!

lazarus

National Correspondent at LibertyNation.com Joe Schaeffer is a veteran journalist with 20+ years' experience. He spent 15 years with The Washington Times, including 8+ years as Managing Editor of the newspaper's popular National Weekly Edition. Striving to be a natural health nut, he considers staring at the ocean for hours to be an act of political rebellion.

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About the author

National Correspondent at LibertyNation.com Joe Schaeffer is a veteran journalist with 20+ years' experience. He spent 15 years with The Washington Times, including 8+ years as Managing Editor of the newspaper's popular National Weekly Edition. Striving to be a natural health nut, he considers staring at the ocean for hours to be an act of political rebellion.